As R. put it:
A sort of FAQ and very condensed overview of the content of SN Balagangadhara's "The Heathen In His Blindness": itself a brilliant but very long and dense tome.
"Chapter-wise Questions and Answers to understand “The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion"
A sort of FAQ and very condensed overview of the content of SN Balagangadhara's "The Heathen In His Blindness": itself a brilliant but very long and dense tome.
"Chapter-wise Questions and Answers to understand “The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion"
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Guest II · 301 weeks ago
He is a master of obfuscation. Consider, for example this supposed definition: "religion is what does not exist in India." This gives us lots of odd religions, kangaroos, for example, or the Empire State Building, or enough clean water. On the other hand, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which all exist in India, are not religions by this test.
SNB makes much of certain idiosyncrasies of the Abrahamic religions to claim, I think, that they are indispensable elements: founder, holy books, and church like organization, whatever that may mean. Such details are not very interesting to those who study the common features of cultures, which is why they usually concentrate on more general features like belief in supernatural spirits or gods, rituals associated with propitiating those spirits, and communal beliefs about moral principles. It is perhaps an exaggeration to claim that every culture has some version of these, but many, definitely including Hindu India, do.
Even SNB's rather arbitrary features fail in the case of Hinduism. Hindus have temples, and those temples have what I would call "church like organization." Nor is Hinduism any more free of Holy books than Judaism. The Vedas, and the Upanishads are just such, and the Mahabharata is an interesting parallel to the Hebrew-Christian Bible. I can't prove it of course, but I'm confident that Hinduism had its own crew of founders, the authors of the Vedas and Upanishads playing the role of the Hebrew prophets. Just because you don't know all their names doesn't mean they didn't exist.
Of course, as I mentioned, definitions are ultimately arbitrary, so if SNB chooses to define kangaroos as a religion and Hinduism as not a religion, he can't be faulted on grounds of logic. On the other hand, if he, or others, wish to use his peculiar definitions to evade the Indian Constitution's ban on certain kinds of religious discrimination, his nonsense should be categorically rejected.
Guest II · 301 weeks ago
Unlike much or most of the world, India has a constitution that guarantees freedom of religion, explicitly banning promotion of any religion or interfering with the practice of any religion. Moreover, it is clear that the authors prohibition of promotion of religion considered Hinduism, Buddhism and other native Indian religions as being included in that ban on promotion.
As in many other countries, the Hindu majority has chafed under this ban and has systematically undermined it and persecuted other religions. Under the current Hindutva political regime, this promotion and persecution has reached an occasionally frenzied peak, including rape, torture and murder of a child.
SNB's sophistries would be irrelevant if it didn't serve to promote these clear contraventions of the Constitution. In that context they are destructive and potentially worse. India can either honor the wise choices of some its founders and become modern, or it can try to go back. The latter rarely works.
Guest II · 300 weeks ago
Oh well.
Guest II · 300 weeks ago
macgupta 81p · 300 weeks ago
SNB wants to talk about a theory of religion. It is infinitely less of a quibble than e.g., whether Pluto can be classified as a planet or not. Whether Pluto is a planet or not ultimately traces to theories of planetary formation.
He is a master of obfuscation. Consider, for example this supposed definition: "religion is what does not exist in India.
This is part of his argument about why he doesn't want to quibble about definitions.
SNB makes much of certain idiosyncrasies of the Abrahamic religions to claim, I think, that they are indispensable elements: founder, holy books, and church like organization, whatever that may mean.
SNB here is merely indicating some anomalies, to get the reader to think. In his theory, religion is an explanatory intelligible account of the universe. To understand the precise import of that, you have to read a bit, I'm sorry, just as will you have to read a little to make sense of "For the Zariski topology, one has cohomological descent if 𝑅 is regular." No mention of founder, holy book or church.
Even SNB's rather arbitrary features fail in the case of Hinduism. Hindus have temples, and those temples have what I would call "church like organization."
First, even with no SNB inserted, temples do not have "church like organization". Please understand this first, very few if any of the Hindu traditions are congregational.
Second, in light of SNB's theory of religion, temples, churches, congregations, etc., are all secondary to what a religion is.
The Vedas, and the Upanishads are just such, and the Mahabharata is an interesting parallel to the Hebrew-Christian Bible.
There is no Hindu writing or oral tradition with the status that the Christian Bible has to Christianity.
A crude analogy is like saying that Newton's Principia and Herodotus The Histories are both books, and so are parallel in a meaningful sense. One can construct many such shallow isomorphisms, but they won't lead to any understanding. Yes, Principia and The Histories are both books in a library, but what understanding has that provided? If you start asking question like - What role do the contents of the books play, what intellectual processes led to the contents of the books, and so on, the fact that both are books in a library becomes increasingly uninteresting and irrelevant.
Incidentally, Balu explains why it is natural for us in the modern world to be trapped in such shallow isomorphisms with respect to religion and culture, like a good theory should. A good theory explains not only the reality but also the appearances, e.g., why we perceive the sun to be going around the earth.
I'm answering you under the assumption that you are making a good faith effort to understand.
Guest II · 300 weeks ago
I like that idea, but I have spent the last couple of years studying what I consider to be an explanatory intelligible account of the universe. In my classes it's called the Lambda CDM Cosmology. Does that count as a religion?